LANDMARKS
Since concepts
of 'Creation' and ' A Creator' are impreceptible to the senses,
religious communities have always relied on icons as a stimulus or
focus for prayer and meditation. Some have argued that
aesthetic experience through contact with heritage landmarks, no
matter how small, can border on the religious or
mystical. It is maintained that that the experience of
wild things involves "awe in the face of large, unmodified natural
forces and places – such as storms, waterfalls, mountains and
deserts." Landmarks of this kind may be taken as
cosmic icons for mediation on the meaning of life and the
universe.
There is no doubt
that life is carried forward because molecules of DNA, which
constitute the genes, embody a coded history of life's genealogical
past. In this respect we are part of nature in everything we do,
from stepping on a bus to painting a house. Like all other living
things our behaviour is governed by a chemical coding of our genes,
which is a record of successful long-term interactions with the
environments of our ancestors, near and in the distant past. It is
a biochemical memory that remembers the body's responses of growth
reproduction and behaviour that have been responsible for
survival.
In this respect, the
body of a plant, animal or microbe represents a kind of prediction
that its future environmental experiences will, to a general
extent, resemble those of its ancestors. Animals, especially those
with brains, are particularly good survivors because the nervous
system also has a remarkable picturing ability for remembering what
is the most useful way of responding to short-term variations in
the environment. As a computer model, the brain (hardware) and its
networks of memory cells (the software) have evolved to
continuously scan the environment, and use memories of good and bad
responses to keep short-term survival strategies up to
date.
The genes model the
basic aspects of the environment that change very slowly over
generations. The brain produces models of survival as day-to-day
interactions between perception via the senses and a mental
representation of environment that triggers the correct response.
This interplay between changes in the environment and their
representation as virtual images in the central nervous system
allows us to move through a mental world of our brain's making, and
produce neuromuscular responses that aid survival. Since brains are
also products of natural selection, ancestors, near and in the
distant past, also carried virtual worlds of their contemporary
environments in their heads. Brains are a particular expression of
DNA tasked with the role of recording lifespan-events as pictures
to help predict the immediate future.
Landmarks as maps
We describe these
virtual worlds as 'patterns of thought' and the process of
perception that generates them as 'reading the environment'. This
faculty of 'graphicity' is a vital process of comprehension. We
become interested in shapes and colours that do not fit into the
known. In this we prefer intriguing suggestions to actual
representation. For example, a trail of footprints occurring
together with disturbed vegetation and dung deposits is read
intently by a hunter as the pattern of his prey. It is comprehended
as a detailed mental map of events over a wide area that points to
the course of action necessary if the hunt is to be
successful.
According to Steven
Dawkins it seems plausible that the ability to perceive the signs
and generate such pictures might have arisen in our ancestors
before the origin of speech in words. If the thought-picture could
be represented as an arrangement of shapes and signs, constructing
an environmental model in the
head is a helpful
way to communicate, and coordinate what has to be done in a social
group. Such mental imagery could be an educational resource to help
group cohesion and promote social evolution. This seems the likely
origin of art, which depends on noticing that something can be made
to stand for something else in order to assist comprehension and
communication. Dawkins suggests that it could have been the drawing
of mind-maps in the sand that drove the expansion of human
evolution beyond the critical threshold of communication that other
apes just failed to cross.
It may be pertinent
that ceremonial sand-pictures of native Australians function as
maps. They are patterns created by an individual 'dreamer' through
the two-dimensional spacing of symbols standing for people and
local topographical detail. The fact that these patterns are
closely associated with 'dreaming' is significant. Dreams are set
up by our simulation software using the same modelling techniques
used by the brain when it presents its updated editions of reality.
These aboriginal maps of the dreamtime were community properties.
Their role was to codify the neighbourhood and its use by the
community in the form of a locally accepted non-representational
pattern of relationships. The collection of pictographs reinforced
the existence of a tribal territory and its natural resources by
incorporating stories about its occupation by the group's
ancestors. The pictures, now being made permanent works of
art on cloth and hardboard, had a social function to maintain a
subculture of understanding by reinforcing comprehension of group
identity and space.
